Hamilton Nolan

Today in True Historical Misadventures of the CIA: the time they tried to turn a cat into a spy.

Emily Anthes writes that one of the spy agency's wacky 1960s brainstorms was to implant a microphone, antenna, and transmitter onto the body of a live cat, and then try to teach that cat to go hang around people who needed to be spied upon. "For its first official test, CIA staffers drove Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench. Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi." They gave up after that.